What Windows 11 settings improved battery life and responsiveness after upgrade?

[Ella.S]

I recently upgraded my primary work machine, a two-year-old laptop, from Windows 10 to Windows 11, and I've noticed a significant hit to battery life and general system responsiveness, especially when multitasking with several browser tabs and development tools open. I've already checked for driver updates and disabled some of the more obvious visual effects. For others who have tackled Windows 11 performance optimization, what deeper system settings or services did you find were worth disabling or tweaking? Are there specific power plan adjustments or registry edits that made a tangible difference for you on similar hardware? How effective are the built-in troubleshooting tools versus third-party utilities for cleaning up background processes and startup items, and what's the best way to identify which specific process or service is causing the most drain?

[StellaW]

Two quick, practical wins to start: 1) in Task Manager, go to the Startup tab and disable apps with high startup impact that you don’t need at boot. 2) in Settings > Privacy & security > Background apps, turn off apps you don’t need running in the background. After a reboot, see if things feel snappier before you dive deeper.